“It’s Only Vanity if It’s Not Good”: Daisy Aldan and Women Midcentury Small Press Publishers

"Well, if you're a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning & then there's this other place where you put yourself in terms of everybody"

Alice Notley, Doctor Williams' Heiresses

I. Predecessors, Siblings, Successors, Friends

Anthologies have a way of changing over time. Despite aspiring to be summative resources, few remain so; the rest become curious sorts of artifact, neither book nor periodical, a record of departed interest. Historical comparison can help restore their original context. For example, if I tell you that an editor named Daisy Aldan published an anthology called A New Folder with her press Folder Editions in 1959, the year before Donald Allen published The New American Poetry, 1945-60 with Grove Press, and that the latter has sold "more than 100,000 copies," according to the most recent edition's cover, you might get a quick sense of Aldan's role as a crucial literary precursor to Allen.1 2).Regardless of whether you know Aldan's anthology, you may be frustrated to find her framed in terms of Allen at all — especially given that her work has faded into obscurity and his, at least partially inspired by hers, is still regarded as canonical and field defining.3 The occlusion we see in the Allen/Aldan case is indicative of a gendered occlusion that occurred generally in midcentury small press publishing, and that has persisted to some extent in the coverage of that moment within literary scholarship.

This question of valuation is also a recursive question about aesthetic lineage. Aldan and A New Folder might put us in mind of a modernist thought experiment — Virginia Woolf's earlier, now-famous Judith Shakespeare characterization. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf demonstrates how the social expectations of and strictures on women make it impossible for Judith, sister to William, to succeed in her chosen work autonomously or at all; in Woolf's fictional account, Judith is recognizable, if recognized at all, because of her name and genealogy. Must William always eclipse Judith — and must his work always be present as the standard by which to measure her success or failure?

This question of relation and lineage is one that the heirs of modernism like Aldan (1918-2001) and other midcentury US-based small press women editors and publishers take up with ambivalence, often conceptualizing ways to value work other than by comparison with their male peers. For Aldan's younger contemporary Alice Notley (b. 1945), seeking a lineage of writers in the lecture Doctor Williams' Heiresses in 1980, imagining Judith means imagining her as part of deliberately imprecise relations: "From out of the West came Gertrude Stein, the daughter of the guy who wrote the 800-page novel & the girl who thought maybe rightly that she was Shakespeare."4 We can read Stein here as the daughter of the novelist and the woman "who thought maybe rightly that she was Shakespeare" — or as "the girl" Judith, sister to Shakespeare — or as Shakespeare herself. The qualifier "maybe" in the phrase "maybe rightly" reveals how occlusion can make it hard to see these relations and lineages.

Following Notley's ahistorical and aesthetic concept of inheritance, this essay uses the words relation and lineage, especially the latter, to loosely indicate a sense of affiliation or continuity that is not always coterie based. As the epigraph suggests, midcentury women editors/publishers often have a sense of singularity or lack — that they are on the vanguard, and/or that women writers are not adequately represented in the publishing scenes. When I interviewed Notley in 2010 about her editing of the little magazine CHICAGO (1972-1974), her complaint then was not that her editing work had been framed by her relationships with male poets but that she had not received recognition for her small press editing and publishing at all.5 During our correspondence, she pulled the magazines out of storage "under the bed," writing, "They are extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful, and I can't believe what amazing poets I published. And why have I gotten no credit for this whatsoever?" she asked. "Why doesn't anyone ever mention them?"6 Of course, being overlooked and being on the vanguard are not the same thing; however, they both imply actively being "near the beginning," one in terms of production and one in terms of reception. For midcentury women editors and publishers, this sense of being "near the beginning," is often concurrent with the creative claiming of relationality with other women editors/publishers as peers, predecessors, successors, and friends. This essay interweaves the stories of Notley and other women and non-binary editors/publishers with Aldan's (and, by implication, Judith's). The material used to tell these stories is divided between interviews with midcentury women editors/publishers and Aldan's archival papers — in particular those relating to editing A New Folder — suggesting lineages and alternative ways that women frame their relationality.

Archival material and small press publications — especially anthologies like Aldan's and Allen's — provide a snapshot, albeit an imperfect one, into literary scene gender dynamics.7 It is difficult to know whether or not Aldan might have had the same complaint as Notley about the lack of attention to her publishing activities, given the recognition of her accomplishments in her lifetime.8 However, her proximity to The New American Poetry and her absence from later discussions about the anthology is indicative of the ways in which women editors working between the 1950s and 1980s have been overlooked. Aldan's Folder magazine (1953-56) and A New Folder anthology (1959) were published in the postwar period during the "anthology wars" of the late 1950s and early 1960s.9 Contemporaneous publications helmed by women were scarce in these years, though Aldan is not exactly solitary: Lita Hornick ran Kulchur from 1961-64, Hettie Jones was involved in Yugen from 1958-62, Diane di Prima co-edited The Floating Bear beginning in 1961, and so forth. However, given the continuity between Folder magazine and A New Folder, combined with the relative lack of women-involved publications in the 1950s and Aldan's direct connection to other women modernists such as Anaïs Nin, Aldan's editorial work stands out.10

Nonetheless, much of Aldan's work — especially on A New Folder — is absent from the scholarship about the era, and when Aldan and A New Folder are discussed, it is often in comparison with Allen's anthology. This context is an important first step, and scholars who have written about A New Folder have brought it back into the conversation by suggesting its influence on The New American Poetry. In what follows, I am also not able to avoid comparing Aldan and Allen; however, this essay aims to bring Aldan out of the footnotes and position her as a key figure in a nongenealogical lineage of women small press editors and publishers while exploring some of the ensuing characteristics of such a lineage. Furthermore, in tracing such a lineage or lineages, we can also begin to see how these women constellated communities and groups in various ways, allowing the participants to view themselves both as heiresses and makers of lineages, a vantage Aldan embraced in her early editing and publishing.

In 2010, when I began to interview women midcentury small press publishers and editors from the nexus of "Second Generation New York School" poetry, I wanted to get the accounts of women editors into the historical record.11 I had the sense that the "often tacitly gender-blind allegiances of the postwar poetry community," in Anne Dewey and Libbie Rifkin's words, were enabling the exclusion of women from the historical record, even if unintentionally, because treating gender as inconsequential perpetuates the ongoing recognition of male editors and the lack of attention to women.12 Furthermore, the continuing legacy of these allegiances was contributing to a lack of documentation about women in independent publishing between the 1950s and 1980s. Some scholarship has explored the publishing work of not only Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1917-46)13 but also other women at the vanguard of modernist small press publishing.14 In 2010, however, the dynamics of "tacitly gender-blind allegiances" were being replicated in scholarship pertaining to the so-called Mimeograph Revolution, the period of DIY and small press publishing that resulted in a flurry of little magazines and books.15 Additionally, despite the fact that the small press scholarship contains a small but growing collection of texts devoted to interviews with and accounts by midcentury and contemporary little magazine and small press publishers, women and non-binary editors/publishers are largely underrepresented in these volumes.16

In the period between the 1950s and the 1980s — the decades implied by the long "midcentury" in the title — women conceive of this nongenealogical lineage as constellated around inclusion/exclusion in spaces and technologies, professionalization/self-publishing, geographical proximity or mobility, friendship, and gender and identity politics. The period occurs after much of the activity of influential modernist women editors/writers and ends in the widespread technological shift to computers (and Xerox machines) and the brilliant profusion of third wave feminist zines and other publications. This time period also covers the proliferation of MFA programs and the ways in which the professionalization of creative writing both codifies and challenges modes of publication. In this context, small press publishing might attempt to disrupt or actively participate in such professionalization — or anywhere in-between, dependent also on the particular historical vantage point.

In the long midcentury cultural context, the legacy of gendered institutional disenfranchisement was both recent and ongoing. Aldan printed Folder magazine surreptitiously in the 1950s because women were not allowed in the printer's union; Notley was the only woman in the fiction workshop at Iowa in 1967, saying, "There were just so few women around, in fact"; Rena Rosenwasser describes how "supporting organizations such as the Book Club of California and the Roxburghe Club did not allow women to be members, or even come to functions except for once or twice a year. They were just snooty men's clubs, like old British gentlemen's clubs."17 Through these four decades — importantly, the ones in which second wave feminism was also shaping the larger cultural context — women used publishing in various ways to push against the sexism and misogyny of literary scenes writ large.

How that resistance intersects with the women's movement more generally differs across the interviews. Some editors/publishers overlapped at spaces associated with the movement or thought of their publishing activity as a component of it: Lisa Kellman and Deborah Costello (Black Oyster Press, 1981-84) had both spent time at the Women's Building in LA, and Susan Sherman (IKON, 1967-69 and 1982-94) became increasingly involved in the movement through the Fifth Street Women's Building in New York. Barbara Smith (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1980-95) describes the urgent role of the press in building the LGBTQIA+ and women's movements, which in turn provided the audience for the press's publications, though she often found herself "more comfortable" in a Black publisher's consortium, where other publishers were "engaged in the same challenges of being Black publishers, publishers of color, in an inhospitable publishing environment."18 Some editors, like Patricia Spears Jones, edited important movement-adjacent anthologies, while others were more skeptical of anything they saw at the time as related to identity politics, or changed their minds about this issue later.19

Aldan is one of several editors/publishers who were often wary of projects that foregrounded gender or race, especially in the early decades, seeing such projects as further marginalizing their participants instead of shifting the center or the terms of participation. Though perhaps well-meant politically, these "race-blind" stances often had the consequence of replicating white-supremacist structures of exclusion: white women involved — especially those affiliated with New American and innovative poetry — often published white authors, many of them friends. That said, poetry publication in the era wasn't entirely segregated by race. Several of the previously mentioned publications and publishers featured women writers of color, especially into the 1980s; however, as in the contemporary publishing scene, diversity in editorial positions was slower than diversity of writers featured, a fact relevant to the founding of Kitchen Table and later projects like Aché: A Journal for Black Lesbians (1989-95). The editorial work of women of color crossed over with scenes like the Poetry Project — as with Patricia Spears Jones and her co-editors Sara Miles, Fay Chiang, and Sandra Maria Esteves's editing of Ordinary Women — and the circles surrounding the Nuyorican Poetry Café, though Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller point to the ways in which scholarly framing of feminism further marginalized innovative writing by women of color.20

In sum, the vital work showcasing women of color is often adjacent to codified literary history, echoing the tacit refusal to acknowledge gender. Because of these marginalizations, women of color often pursued editorial roles in scenes organized around race more than gender. Janice Mirikitani, editor of the foundational Asian American literary magazine Aion (1970-71) and the bilingual Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980), used publishing in her social justice work with Glide Memorial Church.21 In her interview, Renee Tajima-Peña articulates how, like her subsequent filmmaking practice, she viewed Bridge as "a cultural organ of the [Asian American] movement" in a tradition of Asian American publications.22 Small presses also helped drive the Black Arts Movement. In Detroit, Naomi Long Madgett founded Lotus Press in 1972, now Lotus Broadside Press, and the aforementioned Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded in Boston in 1980 by a group of women that included Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith. It is urgently important to showcase these projects while not denying how race-based exclusions functioned in artistic scenes.

Because of the importance of these and other historical particulars, I do not want to pose the commonalities sketched out in this essay as imperative across all the interviews. In considering the interviews themselves as both literary texts and historical accounts, we must resist generalizing across moments and experiences. In these four decades, US-based literary communities were often fairly geographically mobile; editors pursued publishing agendas specifically designed to query the notion that schools and movements had fixed perimeters and that magazines reinscribed these boundaries. Some editors found it useful to flag these groupings to publish across them, while others sought to question the groupings themselves. However, in the sections that follow, I draw out several commonalities. First, this lineage suggests a long view of literary value and its independent quality over time, offering forms of literary valuation outside of comparison to established literary male predecessors and peers. Second, women in these scenes often saw friendship as a component of publication and distribution, suggesting adaptable relations in which friends shift between creating, critiquing, and publishing their own and each other's work.23 Finally, the shifting writer/critic/publisher roles support a symbiotic understanding of writing and publishing as components of a holistic process. Women small press editors and publishers therefore often had dual goals, which were to publish work that would accrue value while simultaneously developing as writers themselves.

II. "You Put Yourself Somewhere Near the Beginning": From Folder to A New Folder

Though Aldan stayed involved in literature her entire life, she is an example of someone whose editorial and writerly scenes and practices changed over time. She was born in New York City in 1918 and had a long career as a poet, teacher, translator, and editor/publisher. She authored more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and was also a prolific translator; she published the first English translation of Mallarmé's Un coup de dés. She was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, was a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and was an influential teacher to thousands of students. In our correspondence, Gerard Malanga, a collaborator of Andy Warhol's, credits her with introducing him to poetry and guiding his poetic career.24 Furthermore, even her teaching was in line with her several hyphenated roles; another former student, Renee M. Roberts, remembers her requiring her students to create little books of their own work,25 and Aldan's first book of poems (1946) resulted because one of students was talented at calligraphy and Aldan "thought it would be nice to put my poems in calligraphy."26

Throughout her interviews and correspondence, Aldan talks about her teaching as a way to support her publishing endeavors. Her initial impulse to self-publication quickly changed form, from single-author pamphlet to a magazine that included her as one author among many — a shift partially influenced by her PhD work at NYU on French surrealist poetry and its American inheritors, research that would have included little magazines in which editors published their own work. Some recent scholarship discusses her work on Folder, a magazine of art and literature published by Tiber Press between 1953 and 1956 and co-edited with Richard Miller, and a current literary magazine has even named itself Folder in homage.28 Folder ran for four issues, each of which contains work either by or translated by Aldan. Perusing it, you can see why it merits attention: its portfolio format (a result of not having the money for binding)29 works beautifully with the enclosed silkscreen prints and letterpress text, and the table of contents now reads like a Who's Who of the midcentury New York art and poetry scenes, especially those intersecting with French symbolism and surrealism.30

In moving from a magazine to a bound book, Aldan practices the editorial criticality described by Sophie Seita in Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, which underscores the ways in which both editors and writers historicize and reflect upon their publishing work. "Editors and contributors," Seita writes, "became and still are theoreticians and pedagogues of the little magazine." These magazines, she argues, share the qualities of "provisionality, periodicity, multiple authorship, [and] heterogeneity of contents" in being serial to some degree, or "aim[ing] toward periodicity."31 As an anthology that is both an extension of the earlier magazine and something new, as the title suggests, A New Folder embraces some of these characteristics and suggests how the genre categories of magazines and anthologies shade into each other.32 In a 1991 interview, Aldan emphasizes the less ephemeral qualities of the anthology. She says: "I felt that Folder had finished its mission, and I wanted to put out instead a book, a bound book... [It had] about 50 poets, three-quarters of them women and about 50 pages, their works. And it got a lot of attention; you can imagine how much this is worth now."33 Here, Aldan exaggerates not only the book's appreciation in monetary value but also the number of women included, which is one-third of total poets and artists, or 22 of 77.

Though one-third is significantly different from three-quarters, as previously discussed, we might compare A New Folder to other anthologies of the moment to understand the more general trend: New Poets of England and America (1957), which provoked both Allen and Aldan's anthologies, published six women out of 52, or about one-eighth; The New American Poetry published four out of 44, or one-eleventh. A New Folder's relatively better numbers are one reason behind the impulse to compare it with The New American Poetry. In a short 2011 talk on A New Folder later published in the online forum Jacket2, Michael S. Hennessey resurrected Aldan's anthology for critical attention, largely by comparing and suggesting it as a precursor to Allen's.35 More recently, Stephan Delbos's The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism uses Allen's archive to show how Aldan's anthology was "something of a touchstone" for Allen.36 Delbos finds that in Allen's correspondence about The New American Poetry several other writers bring up Aldan's book, provoking Allen to make somewhat contradictory statements about his own editing in contrast with hers.37

Despite the fact that Allen's correspondence contains these exchanges with others about Aldan, the two do not seem to have directly corresponded at length. Their papers contain a small exchange about permissions: Allen tried to avoid using poems Aldan had published, though he had "slipped up in three cases."38 But if Allen was not as generous as he might have been about acknowledging Aldan's influence, Aldan did not consider the anthologies to be in competition. Delbos's book mentions another letter, in which Aldan alludes to, as Delbos puts it, "the shared affinities between the anthologies" and commiserates with Allen after a negative review of The New American Poetry.39 And Aldan went further than commiserating. In 1960 the magazine Trace published a negative review of The New American Poetry by Curtis Zahn.40 In response, Aldan wrote a strongly worded letter to the magazine's editor, James Boyer May (see Figure 3), which opens:

I rarely write letters of protest, but I was shocked by the vindictive review of Donald Allen's anthology, written by Curtis Zahn. [...] I don't believe that I have ever seen a review of any book that was less objective, reeked of [sic] personal vindictiveness, and which gave a false picture of the contents of the volume.41

Here Aldan takes up the "shared affinities" between the two anthologies and savvily positions her own anthology alongside Allen's while admitting that his contains some work she dislikes. She continues, "However, I must say, that it [New American Poetry] IS one of the most exciting collections, containing excellent work, which has appeared since A NEW FOLDER: AMERICANS: POEMS AND DRAWINGS, my own anthology." In aligning her own anthology with Allen's maligned one, Aldan makes the interval between their publications sound much longer than one year, writing a version of literary history. If the anthologies are different, she suggests, it is less that they are in competition and more that Aldan's provides a fuller picture of the same scene: near the end of the letter, she concludes, "My only argument with Mr. Allen is that more work by American women poets of which there is quite a number of excellent ones, was not included. His anthology included only three, I believe. Mine included eighteen, all worthy and fine writers."43 Aldan sees herself as a predecessor to Allen and also as a protector, yet tensions of that relationship are downplayed because she and Allen are working together against critics like Zahn. Aldan is fully aware that the disproportionate number of men to women being published does not reflect who is actually writing, and she insists on positioning herself, her editorial work, and women's writing in the discussion about what would become known as the New American Poetry.

And yet she doesn't stay in the discussion. Her work on A New Folder in particular becomes present as a spectral version of Allen's; Delbos follows Hennessey in writing, "As a document that suggests a path not taken, a path that was in fact completely obscured by Allen's anthology, A New Folder is fascinating."44 From this starting point, we can consider strategies for bringing Aldan out of the margins. How can we put her in the historical record without reinforcing an opposition between Aldan and Allen (and Judith and William), or a story of one anthology winning out over another? One provisional answer places Aldan in relation to other women writers and publishers — and thus focuses on documenting a community of Judith Shakespeares. Aldan becomes an editor in part to publish her own work and create her own community. This founding, or putting herself "near the beginning," is a repeated action across the history of midcentury woman publishers/editors; Aldan need not directly inspire other women in order for us to see this action as a commonality that both puts the women in relationality and allows them each the founder spotlight in turn. In order to pursue this idea, we will now turn to Aldan's production and selection practices in relation to those of women small press publishers who came after her.

A New Folder was printed in an edition of 1,000, the first 125 copies of which were hardcover — a small but respectable print run for poetry. Always attentive to production, Aldan decided when she saw the proofs that she wanted better paper and a hardcover edition, but the books then cost six times the original estimate. She hoped to recoup some of the funds through the June 1959 release reading at the Living Theatre (see Figure 4), but the theater was also in a hole, and nine months later sent her just $20.45Her correspondence reveals that she was adamant about tracking down money owed to Folder Editions in the years after A New Folder — a necessity perhaps born out the experiences of publishing the anthology. Much of her correspondence involves badgering booksellers and others for payments. In the years following A New Folder, Folder Editions increasingly turned away from the New York scene and more toward translation and poetry from other cultural contexts, as well as Aldan's interest in the work of Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophy spiritual movement.

What is somewhat surprising, given the years and contexts covered by interviews with Aldan and the Women in Independent Publishing interviewees, is that activity that might now be seen as separate from "professional" publishing was nonetheless taken quite seriously. Despite financial pressures, Aldan remained a staunch advocate for self-publishing throughout her life, and even saw losing money on publishing as part of the vocation of being a poet. In 1970 a poet she had published, Virginia Brady Young, wrote to complain about sunk costs. Aldan responds, "Some people spend money for fur coats, antiques, stamp collections. We poets spend ours on our work if we want it out in the world. ... Its [the book's] presence in the world defines you as published POET. That was the purpose of the publication."46 In the 1991 interview quoted earlier, she refers to the tendency to call self-publishing "vanity" publishing, saying:

Yes, I believe it's only vanity when it's not good. As a matter of fact today, especially in poetry — today, they won't publish your work if it's called literature. ... Poets must publish their own work! And they mustn't be ashamed. It will find its way in the world if it's good.47

The Oxford English Dictionary's first example of "vanity publisher" comes from 1922, though the first examples for "vanity publishing" and "vanity press" appear in the 1960s,48 and all three terms seem to have risen substantially after the 1950s up until the 1990s.49 Given the legacies of Whitman, Dickinson, Woolf, and many others, it's obvious to say that some of the stigma around self-publishing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Less obviously, the interviews suggest that regardless of historical moment, much of this stigma has to do with the social and cultural spheres surrounding publication contexts. When I asked Bernadette Mayer (0 TO 9, 1967-69 and United Artists Books, 1977-present)50 about the dislike for self-publishing, she said, "Nowadays there is. But you know what, there was then, too. But you'd just ignore it. I mean, it's the stupidest thing. I mean, what is that all about? Capitalism, perhaps?"51 Aldan's notion that the quality of the work will lead to its long-term circulation and valuation — that it "will find its way in the world if it's good" — echoes in other accounts. Sometimes, like in Aldan's idea of value, this sense is optimistic and future-oriented, as when Hettie Jones, who co-edited Yugen (1958-62) says, "I do think the best kinds of work will finally come to the fore,"52 and when Patricia Spears Jones says, "Go for excellent, that is what lasts."53 Other times it is a historical truth: about poetry readings, so often tied to the business of publishing through release parties, Eileen Myles, who edited dodgems (1977-79), says, "And later on you learned that more people heard you than you knew. There was a nice thing of not trying hard but still feeling connected."54 In both of these instances, through readings and some small press publications, something that is almost ephemeral accrues value, primarily at the local community level but potentially expanding across time and place, in a series of moves so minor that they are often invisible. In some scenes, this value comes primarily from a participant's continued engagement with writing scenes; in others, it comes from surprising circuits of circulation and readership. The publishers are suggesting that the fact of whether or not the publisher and writer are the same person has very little to do with the accrual of value.

III. "You Print by Hand": Typesetting, Typing, and Production Technologies

Noting this accrual also reflects an attunement to the gendering of production technologies and women's labor across periods of history longer than the midcentury. The affective and sensorial histories suggested by the use of various publishing technologies and their embodied use by women are often not linear. Midcentury publishers and editors alternately describe them as limiting and liberating in regard to gender. Because of this connection to haptic collective histories, the interviews often return to the nitty gritty details of production — stencil typing, collating parties, distribution details — suggestive (though not always illustrative) of gendered labor histories and their alternatives. One place where gender historically intersects with book production is in typesetting and typing. In an interview with Dennis Barone, Aldan describes how she "set the type by hand" for Folder magazine, first using a "Kinsey press" purchased by mail and later via Linotype, printing surreptitiously at a shop on 82^nd Street.55 "When someone entered the shop," Aldan says, "I had to stop work because women were not allowed in the union then and the printer would have been suspended or fined."56 These labor restrictions contributed to the blurring of domestic and production spaces; many women editors and publishers describe setting up presses in their homes, a choice that, in later decades, was often attributed to financial considerations, but one that should also be seen in historical proximity to labor restrictions and gender bias in publishing.57 This context also informs the sense of accomplishment with which some women discuss typesetting and printing, actions that determine the look of the page. Aldan says, "I think I was the only female linotype setter in New York at the time."58 In secretly doing something women were not permitted to do, Aldan was connected to both predecessors and successors. Rena Rosenwasser and Patricia Dienstfrey describe working "under the influence of the famous photo of Virginia Woolf setting type for the first printing of Ulysses at Hogarth Press" when Kelsey Street began in 1974,59 and accounts of women being both implicitly and explicitly marginalized in print shops persist into the 1980s.60 As part of a professional world from which women had been excluded, typesetting and printing could be considered an empowering or exciting form of labor.

Running parallel to the labor of setting type is that of typing stencils for mimeograph machines, which involves pressing forcefully on typewriter keys to cut letters into a wax-coated sheet. Both typesetting and typing stencils were activities widely discussed as pedagogical — one of the ways in which writing and editing strengthened each other — especially in contexts where women were less frequently involved in the formal study or informal conversation surrounding writing and often taken less seriously as writers. Rosmarie Waldrop (Burning Deck Press, 1961-present) describes setting type as "the greatest lesson in close reading I ever had" and that it "helped make my own poems very lean."61 Likewise, Jones credits typing stencils with teaching concision.62 She says that "the act of typing and retyping" allowed her to hear "the rhythms of everyone's poems" and taught her to "simplify [her own] lines and really absorb what it meant to write a good poem."63 The rhythm and sound of typing is often linked to the musicality of the poem, but the sound itself as pedagogical builds on Friedrich Kittler's description of the sound of the typewriter as a reflex loop motivating more writing.64 Maureen Owen, who edited Telephone magazine (1969-84), says that after the heightened attention required by typing "each word and space and line break" would make the poem "embossed on [her] brain." Notley sums up this sentiment, calling typing "very educational" for learning to write poems.65 This education was about discovering your own poetic process alongside the poetry of the moment.

However, as the typing of stencils loses any associations with typesetting — an off-limits part of the production process — and becomes, in the midcentury, a rote task performed by typists and secretarial workers who were often women, some interviewees talk about the action as gendered and devalued.66 Spears Jones describes having "to type out each of those darn pages" for W. B. (1975), and Mayer refers to typing stencils as "a very womanly reaction, or role to play" that she performed when co-editing 0 TO 9 (1967-69).67 When asked about typing stencils for United Artists magazine and books, she exclaims, "[co-editor] Lewis [Warsh] could type stencils! Isn't that great?"68 Finally, both Barbara Barg and Myles talk about typesetting changing with the use of computers, specifically the Compugraphic 7500 (first produced in 1977),69 and how "typesetting helped people make a living," again shifting the possible gender dynamics of typing and typesetting.70

In the decades between the 1950s and the 1980s, available technologies for book production such as letterpress, mimeo, offset, and computers, mixed to an unprecedented degree while also having different aesthetic implications across contexts. Mimeo, lending its name to an era's wide variety of publications known as the "mimeograph revolution," was the most polarizing among women editors.71 Waldrop states, "Mimeo was never an option: it faded too quickly," and Maxine Chernoff (Oink!, 1971-85,and New American Writing, 1986-present) explains, "...at that time there was the whole movement and history of printing on mimeo machines, and all kinds of sub-par printing that was fairly widely used back then, and widely disseminated and maintained."72 Considered to be ephemeral, the appeal was one of rapidity and collectivity; Owen says, "Mimeo was immediate. It inspired and supported spontaneity. It captured that fabulous feeling of folks coming together and just doing it."73 Or the immediacy got folded back into the material text as aesthetics; she also says, "I'll never forget the feeling of that first issue coming off the Gestetner and the beauty of the rich black ink lifting the poems off the white page."74 For Mayer, one of mimeo's staunchest advocates, the appeal was both its tactility — "touch[ing] each piece of paper" — and its instantaneity, so much so that other modes of production, like letterpress, began to appear precious.75

For letterpress' advocates, like Aldan, the technology offered "sensuous pleasures," as Rosenwasser and Dienstfrey call them, more associated with fine art.76 Kelsey Street began to explore these pleasures through their writer-artistic collaborative projects, while Martha King and Susan Sherman's chapbook press Two and Two (1975) attempted to keep things "low cost, very cheap, easy to produce" — though, as King stipulates, "that does not mean cluttered or ugly."77 Myles disliked the romanticization of mimeo's ease and economy to the point of calling it "cheap and poor," saying, "I never had any sentimental attachment to [the poetry magazine's] scarcity aesthetic,"78 and had a memorable exchange about the topic with Mayer in two subsequent issues of The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1982.79 Additionally, embedded in the debates about aesthetics, cost, and the value of immediacy, is a series of associations between particular production modes and countercultural values, and these associations are not necessarily stable across moments and contexts. For Smith, the paper choice of a press release could help subtly indicate the press's identity and catch the eye of the audience. And of IKON (Series 1, 1967-68), editor Susan Sherman says:

On the other hand, we got all kinds of criticism from some of the movement people about IKON magazine supposedly looking too slick. It was work that made it look that good, not money. It didn't cost more except for using decent paper. We had a really good printer who printed on a huge press sixteen pages at a time... Just because you're doing a movement thing doesn't mean you should have to do it on newsprint — unless it's a newspaper, of course! — and make it look messy. I mean, even when we used the mimeograph — and we used it a lot — we tried to do it as nicely as possible.80

In other words, the technology did not necessarily predetermine the amount of care and attention devoted to particular publications, despite aesthetic assumptions associated with different modes of production.

Of course, there were reasons apart from aesthetics and political alignment to produce something that looked more like a conventional codex, and these had largely to do with the practicalities of distribution. In many of these publication contexts, handmade production qualities excluded a book from certain types of circulation, further contributing to the stigma against self-publishing. Aldan says she wanted a book "[b]ecause when the Folders were in bookstores, people would take them up, and they would look at them and all the pages would fall out on the floor."81 However, distributors and some bookstores also wanted spines. As Mayer says, "...a lot of people that I met have this idea that mimeograph books are not as good as — what we used to call them at the time — 'books with a spine.'"82 Jones confirms that, in the Yugen years, distributors required a spine (though the rule might have been flexible — one distributor "agreed to take on our magazine" because "he liked us"), and Barg decided in 1979 that that Power Mad Press would publish books with spines "because the thing was, back then, you couldn't really get your book... into the bookstores unless it had a spine."83 If not having a perfect-bound spine was often the mark of community and a more inclusive DIY aesthetic process — "No spine, hand-sewn by press members at a dining room table," as Dienstfrey says84 — this mode of production also kept the books from circulating in more well-worn commercial tracks, excluding them from certain spheres of readership. Other editor/publishers, like Myles, became skeptical of the limits of the "scarcity aesthetic" of spinelessness, in terms of both production values and audience. Owen says, "As gratifying and as satisfying as it was to 'make' the books myself through mimeo, it was famously exciting to be able to afford to do a perfect bound publication."85

Even when she was making books by hand, Aldan never was interested in the "scarcity aesthetic." She wanted to make beautiful books, and she wanted them to be distributed. As evidenced by the success of her own self-published poetry, Aldan could get books into the hands of reviewers and readers; her correspondence is full of compliments from readers who were artists but not in fact poets. However, like many, she also struggled with distribution and publicity beyond her circles and was frustrated by the lack of reviews, or by getting good reviews in places where there was no market for the books. In a November 1, 1959 letter to Fowlie, she mentions "very enthusiastic letters from [all] over" in response to A New Folder, but then states, "However, I must still go myself to book stores and I find this a most unpleasant job," unpleasant due to the time involved in peddling the books. 86 Additionally, she actively collected addresses and possible review venues for A New Folder in her correspondence with contributors.

Aldan's reliance on address mailing lists was fairly standard for midcentury distribution. Mayer, Owen, and others describe how distribution took place through "various bookstores and people, individual people,"87 and Owen explains that "mailing book rate was very inexpensive in the 60s and 70s."88 Even for a slightly later magazine like New American Writing, which did have "a couple distributors," much of the work of sending it out "to libraries and subscribers" was done literally in house. Chernoff says, "But for a few weeks every late spring or early summer, the dining room looked like a warehouse — we'd have many copies to send in envelopes to people."89 Additionally, Aldan's dislike of the actualities of distribution was also fairly widely shared, with Smith a notable exception. C. D. Wright (Lost Roads, 1976-present) says, "Actually selling the books was not my forte. Nor is it of most small press editors. Distribution is limited to the outfits designed to serve the small literary press and we did not publish enough titles for the ones who actually had reps."90 King admits, "I was supposed to do promotion ... Which is why I still have a stash of Women & Children First in my basement."91 And when I lament to Barg that such issues persist, despite the ubiquity of publicizing and distributing through internet platforms, she responds, "Give them to the poets, tell them to distribute them! Why should you do all the work? You're putting the book out!"92

Of course, distributors could decline to carry a publication for reasons other than the fact that the books lacked a spine. Series 1 of IKON ceased because it "depended on three major distributors nationwide" to get it to newsstands, and after Sherman published an issue about the Cuban Cultural Congress in 1968, the distributor did not send out the magazines. She says,"I can't prove the government was responsible, but it was pretty obvious when we got the returns of the magazine I put together about the Cuban Cultural Congress ... [The distributor] hadn't even unpacked it."93 Even an irreverent or seemingly countercultural title could put off distributors. Chernoff says that because distributors refused to take Oink!, when they began to publish again after a brief hiatus they renamed the magazine: "So our trick was that we'd give it a big name, New American Writing, but it's really still just Oink! inside. And we didn't really change anything else. ... And so our distribution went way up — at one point we went from distributing about 1,000 copies to almost 6,000 copies."94

Regardless of whether one was using a distributor, the mail was an effective mode of getting the publications out, and some publications, like Lisbet Tellefsen's Aché (1989-95) and Martha King's Giants Play Well in the Drizzle (1983-92) embraced a newsletter format at first. Margaret Randall, editing El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn in Mexico City (1962-69), says, of circulation, "Our ambitions weren't only global, they were universal!"95 Notley similarly used the magazine to expand her aesthetic circles, saying, "I had a lovely list of readers — I just sent CHICAGO... to them without requiring payment, as I remember it — abstract expressionists and second-generation NY School artists for example, all the major NY poets etc, everyone in San Francisco and Bolinas."96 The mail helped constellate scenes when the participants were moving about and changing locations. Aldan especially relied on her correspondents to suggest other poets and give her the addresses of poets who were strangers to her, soliciting work based on word-of-mail recommendations. She was, in fact, quite a bit more interested in expanding the circle of her authors beyond her immediate friends than other postwar small press publishers, perhaps confident in the knowledge that —given the local orientation of distribution — even if you were committed to publishing strangers, they often became friends.

IV. You Print Your Friends: Group and Community

Friends helped make magazines and books and wrote the contents of said publications; friendship, with all its tensions and flexibilities, oriented conceptions of community. The party, in various forms — the collating party, the release party, the post-reading party — was one of the most exuberant versions of community. And parties there were. Jones says, "I mean, our parties were generally the collating parties. But we had a party every weekend!"97 Collating parties, in which magazines were assembled by individuals picking up single pages from piles of copies, often made the authors included in table of contents part of the publishing process; Aldan describes how she and "the poets" collated Folder.98 Later, these collating parties were part of the larger poetry scene surrounding the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Place. Owen says, "Everyone who was local and in the issue would come to help collate and bring friends... It was truly a community effort. We would buy pizza and cokes and wine, and it was a hands-on working party that would continue until the last copy of the issue was stapled and put on the stack."99 Parties provide a glimpse into the shifting, constellating, and participatory characteristics of community. Barg describes a similar scene "for anything that had to be collated."100

On the West Coast, both Jaime Robles (Five Trees Press, 1973-78) and Dienstfrey emphasize release parties: "And there were lots of parties, lots of release parties. Great parties to which everyone would bring ephemera, broadsides and booklets to be shared"; "We were into release parties. We viewed the publication of a book as a cause for celebration with food and wine. We were also into food. And wine."101 Aldan, too, understood the ways in which a good release reading party could shore up a sense of community, and her release reading for A New Folder at the Living Theatre began at midnight. The recording of the event reveals it to have been an efficient affair, with each reading accompanied by a projection of an artist's work and Aldan succinctly introducing everyone. Aldan closes the reading by saying, "A New Folder invites you into the lobby for a reception where you may meet the poets," both positing the poets as separate from the audience — despite making up a good portion of it, given the number of readers — and simultaneously suggesting that the poets are accessible for intermingling.102 When she talks about this reading in 1991, she remembers it as the initiating event for subsequent readings at the Living Theater, as a broader art world event, and as a blast:

It was packed! It was a who's who of dancers, painters, poets, opera singers... [...] They were all part of the circle. 18 books were stolen, so that showed that it was a success [...] we began at midnight and we left at about 4 o'clock in the morning.103

When Frank O'Hara attempts to drop out of the reading because he is leaving the city for the weekend, Aldan uses both friendship and an appeal to his "public responsibility" to convince him to stay and participate.104

If O'Hara already drew an audience in 1959, one would not necessarily glean that fact from A New Folder's table of contents, where he comes fifth in the list of poets after John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, and Aldan herself, a fact to which we will return in the next section. As evidenced by this list, the poetry is certainly New York centered, though it productively crosses generational lines and schools.106 At the same time, we must note that LeRoi Jones is, as he so often was, the token writer of color. Delbos considers the anthology unique for mixing "academic" and avant-garde poetry.107 Aldan, however, did not conceive of it thus: she considered the anthology as part of avant-garde publishing.108 In a May 3, 1958 letter to Madame Caetani, she suggests that, like other contemporaneous editors, a desire to create a more exciting anthology than Donald Hall's — which helped instigate the "anthology wars" — partially motivates her: "Donald Hall has edited one that has been published recently, but although it contains some finely cut jewels, it is a dull affair."109

Before considering a scholar's introduction to the anthology, Aldan tried to involve a matriarch of the avant-garde, Alice Toklas, whose imprimatur would reflect the contents which Aldan thought of as more innovative than traditional. In an undated letter responding to this idea, Eugene Walter writes, "[Toklas's] preface — if she agreed — could give a cachet of civilized pleasure which would indicate to a large segment of the public that this is not another Donald Hall let's-be-professorpoetpals-together anthology!"110 Yet Aldan ends up asking a professor, Wallace Fowlie, to write the introduction, presumably after Toklas declines the invitation, and Aldan's avant-garde has more to do with selectivity and modernist innovations than social groupings. In a January 27, 1959 letter to Toklas, Aldan explains:

[The anthology] is to be very selected — not a million American poets, just SOME. It seemed to me that the anthologies I have seen include mostly poems in the traditional idiom, as if nothing had happened to poetry — and especially American poetry — since 1900, so I felt compelled to remedy that.111

And in a January 25, 1958 letter to Carol Hall, she writes, "I am interested in the most exciting things you have—ones which, perhaps, you have had difficulty publishing elsewhere—not because of inferior quality but on the contrary, because they were more than traditional."112A constellated lineage, one that becomes visible through self-publishing practices, both stands and accrues value apart from the "traditional." Was Aldan, like Alice Notley, "[not] very interested in the idea of groups"?113 Aldan might have had a somewhat capacious sense of community, but she definitely relied on networks and connections. For instance, she and Elliott Stein agree to exchange blurbs — and though he has not seen A New Folder, Aldan asks him to write a blurb anyway, asserting, "it's the only [anthology] so far that's any good."114

Other women editors and publishers are both more and less circumspect about the interpersonal connections that motivate and result from small press publishing. Chernoff takes a long view when she says, "People publish each other — it's the same activity that happened when I was young, only it's a new group and several generations down the line of young people coming aboard and publishing each other."115 Robles says:

I think that remains the model for most presses: you print your friends... I'm not a big fan of the presses who won't publish the people they know, who are their friends, believing that that makes the press somehow more democratic or more objective and therefore somehow more politically correct or aesthetically true or fairer in some sense... I recommend publishing the work you love by the people you love... Make it a gift, or an act of love.116

What is the difference between a group and a community? Perhaps counterintuitively, the way the interviewees use the latter suggests that it moves beyond the local, is always plural, and functions more like a constellation — communities vary in size, are nestled in each other, overlap, and so forth — than the fixed perimeters of a group, and that small press publications make communities dialogic. For many of the women interviewed, editing small press publications did not so much create as enable participation in and expansion of communities. Scholar Rona Cran demonstrates how women editors associated with the Second Generation New York School assert themselves in "material, textual, and cultural spaces in which their presence was registered or negated."117 Notley and others tend to phrase this assertion in terms of communication, community, and enlargement, balancing out the exclusivity of the group: "The magazine was a way of really joining the poetry community, of getting to read a lot of poems." Chernoff also speaks of the magazine as "[keeping] us in touch with a larger community," and likewise Tajima-Peña says, "Publishing Bridge was a communal experience... It was a community.118 Tellefsen, importantly, points to the ways Aché facilitated opportunities for "you [to] see the entirety of your community, from the fresh out baby dyke to the 90-something with her partner."119 Finally, Spears Jones suggests a necessary interplay of community and audience:

While there will always be poets who veer towards monasticism, solitude, the carefully tended garden, there will be others who will speak to, speak of and speak out about specific communities. The trick is to create work that can do that and reach farther than one's own tribe.120

However, small press women publishers and editors did not come to univocal conclusions regarding how the community is expanded through publishing or how best to set up inclusive publishing practices. After A New Folder and the continued lack of women in other anthologies of the period, Aldan thought about putting together an anthology of just women, even sketching out a table of contents. But the project was never realized, and later she would declare herself to be against any identity-based forms of publishing, wary of tokenism and the ways in which such projects could be marginalized.121 To return to the idea of value, her belief in quality as some sort of abstract depoliticized criterion is both typical and problematic. Spears Jones points out how the "poetics" mindset "allowed White poets to question the 'quality' of the work of poets of color,"122 and Sherman describes how the NEA uses the term "uneven" about a piece titled "The Vietnamese Lesbian Speaks" to justify the withdrawal of funding.123 This is one of several ways in which liberal gatekeeping reinforced exclusions, particularly around race.

Temporal distance can help provide clarity about factors contributing to exclusion. Waldrop was one woman who, in 1994, was wary of projects that focused on publishing women. By 2015, however, she had modulated her opinion: "I think I was wrong about the 'ghetto'-problem. The women-only mags and presses were a leavening and helped raise awareness."124 Owen and others have sometimes cast the gender imbalance of the 1970s as uneven access to ambition: "I remember talking to Anne [Waldman] about women poets who weren't getting published. They just weren't knocking on the door."125 Her focus, like that of so many of these publishers, was getting the work out to an audience instead of focusing on the causes of the dynamic. For Chernoff, supporting women students led to publishing opportunities; for Notley, publishing was both a way to give women writers power and to get power, "since men wanted to be in All the magazines."126 Rosenwasser and Dienstfrey, "driven to erase the absence of women in the poetry world" and also to connect to a historical lineage, reiterate that, "Again, there were many women who did not want to be part of gender based projects."127

Myles had the contents for an issue of dodgems 3, which was going to feature more work by women, but never published it. Despite their focus on gender when soliciting submissions, they say:

...all these men gave me poems either dedicated to me or about me & then they wanted me to publish it. I thought I'm either going to look like a huge narcissist or offend them by not publishing it. It was definitely not something they would put on a man. Like my magazine would be filled by all these little china dolls of me.128

Notley experienced this sort of dedicatory (and predatory) practice as well, and though it gestured toward inclusivity by suggesting friendship or camaraderie, it often actually functioned to exclude woman and non-binary writers' work with a gesture that recast the subject as a precious object or as valued in the community precisely for their gender difference, potentially too "fragile" if they attempt to call out an act that others might assert was a compliment or "joke." Here the dedicatory practice, writing for another, also marginalizes their labor.

V. You Print Yourself in Terms of Everybody: Editing and Writing

In addition to being potential dedicatees, Notley, Aldan, and others saw themselves in oscillating and flexible roles as editors, publishers, and writers. In an early moment of what would become Burning Deck Press, Waldrop describes her role in a 1959 University of Michigan prank performance called the Beatnik Hoax as that of being a "spy in the audience." Editors and publishers are, to varying degrees, already in a special espionage category, scoping out work and poets for their journals at readings and in discussions with friends. This phrase is especially apt for illustrating the hidden role of women editors and publishers in this period. But by the early 1980s, women were calling out men in some poetry spaces, particularly those around the Poetry Project, vividly described by Rose Lesniak when she talks about heckling men who "were just out there dreaming in their sexist wonderhood."129 Women midcentury editors and publishers were not only spies in the audience but also hecklers in the crowd, organizers in the wings, and — importantly — writers reading onstage.

In addition to the simultaneously inclusive and exclusive gesture of publishing friends, they also published their own writing, connected to espionage in that self-publishing is sometimes disparaged as a way of "sneaking" into a publication or book catalogue. Throughout this essay I have been referring to much of the publishing activity I have described as "self-publishing," and with good reason; many of the interviewees published their own work to be in conversation with that of other writers they admired. Aldan published herself not only as a contributor to Folder and A New Folder but also as the author and translator of individual volumes with Folder Editions. Waldrop describes how Burning Deck's first letterpress chapbooks, published in 1967, were by herself and Keith Waldrop.130 Many of the editors of magazines especially included their own work. Myles says, "I put in my own best work and also work by people I wanted to be in conversation with. Including my own best poem made me more excited about distributing dodgems widely, me to be in such great company."131 Aldan's understanding of her own group is visualized in the author and artist photographs at the end of A New Folder, where her picture — smiling, gazing up out of the book — tops a hexagon of young poets (see Figure 5).132 Regardless of her role as an editor, she always also saw herself as a writer and translator, and she published her poems or translations in every issue of Folder and in A New Folder. In revisions to a 1993 pamphlet for Folder Editions, which lists titles written or translated by Aldan available from other presses, she crosses out "editor" under her name to shift the emphasis to her role as writer and translator.133

Aldan's blurry oscillation between editor and writer is shared in practice by other women small press publishers, though they have different articulations of the degree to which writing and editing overlap. Sherman sees the selective skills of the editor as similar to the ones the writer uses in writing: "I mean, we edit our work, don't we? We make choices all the time. I mean, a writer knows how to make choices!"134 For many publishers in a small press context, editing is a catch-all word for everything required to shepherd a book to publication while others hear in editing the process of locating and selecting manuscripts. Mayer describes mostly "happen[ing] on [manuscripts] by chance."135 Notley says:

Now that I think about it, I realize that my editing was quite aggressive. It was hard for me to know what it was like at the time, I was so young and there was so much sexism in the atmosphere... I didn't necessarily accept what I was supposed to accept, I picked and chose — for example I might accept one part of a poem in several parts.136

Aldan saw providing feedback as one aspect of editing, asking some writers to significantly cut their pieces (she told Ginsberg that "Howl" was "uneven").137

In a broader conceptual sense, the role of the editor emerges from the "sneaky" ways in which we think about editorial order and disorder, organizing while simultaneously creating a jumble.138 In small press publishing, editorial work is often seen as ferreting out and gathering work, rather than sorting it. This vision of influences how pieces are placed together in a volume and even in a series. King says of Giants Play Well in the Drizzle (1983-92), "the pages were intended to flow and to set off some resonances from one work to another. Counterpoint? Contrast? Dissonance??"139 On a personal level, though, editing allows the writer to communicate with other writers as not only an editor but also a writer, however she differentiates or elides these roles. King calls editing Giants Play Well in the Drizzle a "an important survival tactic besides being a wonderful opportunity for me to work with words and be in touch with interesting writers on my own terms" during the grind of an everyday job.140

When women and non-binary midcentury editors/publishers are connected to "interesting writers" on their "own terms," they can create the kinds of relations and lineages that then constitute so much of literary history. As this essay has been suggesting, for midcentury women editors, publishing felt like beginning, a fact Aldan implicitly acknowledges when, in telling an audience the practical steps to becoming a publisher, she ends by "kick[ing] her foot into the air and saying, 'GO AHEAD AND DO IT.'"141 Aldan's anthology might not have survived the test of time, but recentering it despite — or even precisely because of — its current minor status allows us to, in scholarship, articulate the new beginnings she and other midcentury publishers/editors examined in this essay have been modeling for us all along. In other words, if women and nonbinary editors are asserting a porosity in their lineages by putting themselves at the beginning but also always in relation, it behooves us to imagine a literary history that does similarly, suggesting new beginnings and nongenealogical relations, attempting to see Judith without William.

So what does a literary history that sees Aldan and A New Folder as a major forebearer for postwar poetry look like? It highlights the work and stories of women who were involved with small press publishing, even when they were co-publishing with men.142 It is present- and future-oriented, and not (only) focused on encapsulating the recent past. In this way, it is desirous of change, though not all the editors interviewed in Women would phrase it thus. The change might be political or social — the interviewees had very different aspirations for their publications and broader societal change. Or the future-orientation of the editor might be general: Aldan called editing "fore-intuition";143 Myles says, "I'm always convinced of the poetry & prophecy connection so same goes for editing. Same flow."144 Editing is a place where you have to have optimism about the future, though it does not remedy the exclusions of the present and recent past. A literary history that sees Aldan and A New Folder as a major forebearer for postwar poetry sees these conversations as texts occurring in the literary present; we can continue to have them again and again. It is by no means equitable, and especially in a friendship model, is fed by many of the exclusions that characterize US-based literary history more generally. Its intersectionality means that it includes white queer participants like Aldan much more quickly than women of color, whose publishing communities were often separate, and it requires attention to how the dynamics of race and class excluded writers and editors from small press communities, as well as an additional critical lens focused on undercurrents of marginalization. It requires a more critical assessment of our affective responses to self-publishing as an important component of small-press publishing, and a more transparent look at gatekeeping and the insider/outsider dynamics created by so-called schools and artistic groups. And while contemporary interest in Folder Editions might seem nascent, the press was featured in two exhibitions in New York libraries in the 1990s, reminding us that the process of shifting literary history is always recursive. In bringing up forgotten examples there is eventually power in the accrual, a sort of sine wave formation of research and minor stories becoming major ones.

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Stephanie Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Literature & Creative Writing at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, China. She is the author of three books of poetry, as well as the editor of a book of interviews, Women in Independent Publishing (forthcoming Fall 2024), and co-editor of All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge.

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References